Establishing and maintaining a defined thermal environment is of great significance for newborns and has essentially determined the development of incubators, heated beds, radiation heaters and so-called open intensive care beds and has still not been adequately solved. Generally, the known rectal temperature measurement or a local skin temperature measurement is not sufficient to define the thermal condition and to meter the thermal energy. These measured values as individual values do not provide adequate information with respect to the overall thermal environment of the newborn so that the task is present to provide a method which will provide a complete overview as to the thermal situation of the newborn and its condition with the least possible use of ancillary means. It is of special significance to maintain the so-called condition of well-being for the newborn with the thermal metabolism of the newborn being burdened as little as possible and which is characterized by a minimal consumption of oxygen which is necessary to maintain the life functions.
An incubator equipped with radiation heating elements is disclosed in published German patent application 3,616,359. Here, a sensing or detecting arrangement for the more important parameters is combined with a display device with the parameters including, for example, air temperature, air humidity, skin temperature, pulse frequency and the like. An alarm unit is intended to indicate directly each deviation from the allowed range of the parameters. However, such a monitoring process does not have adequate information as to the temperature zones determining the thermal environment and the control of the operating parameters is therefore essentially determined by pregiven input values.